Sleeper
by ashleysays
Summary: Searching for a planet with sustainable life, the Uchiha empire expands to another galaxy- but finds earth instead. They refuse to interfere with a still-evolving world and choose another solar system 200 light years away. What they weren't expecting was for Haruno Sakura to find them instead, four hundred years later when the human race advances. Rated M.
1. Chapter 1: The Fallen Race

I do not own Naruto.

Hello! Obviously it's been a long time since I have written anything...life and whatnot. But this is how I am going to get over my writer's block and continue on my past stories. I need to get interested in writing again and make this up before i can regain interest in my past works enough to complete them. Hopefully you guys like this. I'm not only obsessed with delusional thinking, i'm also obsessed with space...so, here it is!

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Sleeper  
Chapter 1

"Why am I not surprised to find you here?" Itachi spoke, his voice reverberating through the large chamber. "You should be commanding the dispatch crew, not wallowing in the dark." Again, his words repeated back to him off the thick walls. His younger brother, true to his character, did nothing but turn his seat to face the other wall, where the light of the approaching galaxy did not bother his eyes. The curtains were slightly drawn, as if the young man had opened them earlier that morning, and immediately regretted it.

"I am quite sure they can find their own way off the ship. It isn't necessarily a difficult task." He spat, twirling his empty glass in his hand. Itachi gave a sparing glance to the bar area on the other side of the room, glad to see it was still well stocked. His brother would be of no use if his wallowing had transformed to alcoholism so quickly. He _was_ the craft's commander, after all. Therefore, he permitted it his job to point out the obvious to his foolish little brother: "This is your crew. They don't need you holding their hand as they depart the craft. They need you merely to observe. You cannot give direction if you confine yourself to solitary."

This earned nothing but a grunt and the empty glass hurled in his direction, crashing to the floor unceremoniously. The footsteps of a passerby outside the door temporarily halted in alarm.

"Father would not be pleased." Itachi discouraged, raising a brow at the shattered glass and knowing it to be his best chance to alter the younger Uchiha's plummeting moods. "You're making this harder than it need be. Go out, shake some hands, and command the ranks. That is all." With that he turned on his heel to open the door and let the bright light of the hall to streak in on his younger brother's un-expecting face, smirking when said Uchiha groaned loudly and lifted himself from the seat. He streaked a hand down his face to show Itachi just how much he loathed him in that very instant.

"I should have you killed."

"Now, Sasuke. Keep saying things like that and you'll lose your empire." Itachi chided, holding in a chuckle he knew would only get him throttled as they made their way through the hall to the large command center where everyone had been waiting for the last hour. Sasuke didn't seem very concerned about that- in fact, Itachi was almost positive his younger sibling had planned to never show in the first place.

"What's the status?" Sasuke breathed, plopping into his seat and gazing out at the cluster of stars before them. The galaxy spinning gently in a whirlpool motion, reminding him of his own over 90 million lightyears away. Also reminding him that perhaps he had drank too much the night before, turning away from the spinning cluster that was beginning to make him more than a little nauseous- and looking to his right, regarding a man he didn't bother learning the name of.

The man sputtered for an answer, pressing a few buttons and fumbling over his own hands for a moment. Sasuke merely watched him, turned to raise a brow at his older brother condescendingly, then returned to glaring at the bumbling crewdecker. Finally, once the Uchiha was debating whether to expel him from the spacecraft, the man pulled up the switchboard. It lit the command center before them with detailed holographs of the galaxy's many solar systems, eliminating any that did not fit the category they were searching for.

"We have surveyed these systems, many of which inhabit gas-giants or rocky planets that orbit too closely to their sun for any form of life. There are two systems, however, that seem suitable enough. The first is here," The man widened the scope of the holographic input, making the view of the particular solar system more perceivable. "The first three planets orbit much too closely to their mother-star. But the fourth is non-inhabited and shows few signs of an ability to house life. We would need to change the overall atmosphere of the entire planet to match our own, which should not take too long. But there is still no promises that the actual planet itself will be able to sustain any plant-life-"

"What chances does it give us, even after changing the atmosphere?"

"Uh-" The man glanced at the Uchiha, his Lieutenant, hoping that this wouldn't anger him. "Only a 43% chance with the planet itself. But there are other alternative measures that we may take to ensure its stability. But it will take much longer time to cultivate an actual civilization for our own people-"

"And what of the other solar system? Are its chances higher?" Sasuke rolled his tongue and Itachi threw him a disparaging glance for his bored behavior.

"The other system has a larger sun than the last and also eight planets- four of which are gas and the other four rock. There are two planets capable of housing life. The one less capable is the fourth planet, which is purely desert at this point, but there are traces that there was once water on this." The hologram at the front of the room magnified the planet, a list of the atmosphere's elements appearing on the right-hand side. "At some point the magnetic field of the planet must have died and the solar winds from their sun evaporated all water from the surface. This planet would have a 76% chance of sustainability for life with a change of atmosphere. It is the logical choice." The hologram spun and shifted before returning to a view of the entire system.

"What were the readings of the second planet you spoke of?" Itachi asked, cutting off his little brother's next question, which was most likely going to be the same as his own. Sasuke threw him a glare but listened to the man's answer nonetheless.

"The third planet from the sun has a strong magnetic field and the atmosphere is comparable to our own. There would not need to be any changes and it already has perfect capabilities to house life-"

"Then why not tell us of this planet in the first place?" Itachi cut off his sibling once again. Sasuke growled lowly from his seat to Itachi's left.

"This planet holds life already. From their stage, it seems for millions of years."

"Are they intelligent?" Sasuke cut in, before his brother could intervene once more, smirking when Itachi threw him a look.

The holographic monitor spun to new life, a myriad of pictures and motion overtaking the projection-floor. "By the information we gather from their civilizations, they have evolved quickly in intelligence and technology for their youth. But they still war and still starve. They know almost nothing about life outside of their own solar-system, though they suspect it is possible. Everything they knew about their own life and beginning is from what they learn about the planets and mother-star they orbit."

The pictures that showed Sasuke towering, majestic structures built by the creatures and open, rolling fields or oceans of nature quickly turned to that of hatred and violence. Man against man in vengeful acts. Different groups of their people pitted against one another for many reasons which they each deemed important at the time- not realizing that they were all the same people. "They still use resources from their own planet?" He asked, watching the information skitter to a halt on one particular picture. It was a picture of his own galaxy, so far away. The picture was distorted and slightly blurry from these creature's lack of advanced enough technology, but it was there and it did funny things to his stomach.

"Yes. And from the light of their own sun." the man brought up a different picture of strange flat discs reflecting the sun's rays. "Their intelligence will grow and prosperity will follow. In approximately one hundred years, their race will advance to another level of technology suitable for contact."

"But for now, we do not interfere." Itachi spoke sternly, walking up to the controls and flicking the tip of his finger over the console until more information appeared- pictures of the creatures themselves, so alike to Sasuke's own and that strange feeling in his stomach returned. "They're so tiny." Itachi mused, tilting his head slightly and smirking at the image of the people, all clustered together and lifting some sort of fabric on a stick in the air, waving in the wind with its stripes and stars. "Do you agree, little brother?" He turned to Sasuke, who took this opportunity to finally rise from his position and join Itachi at the console.

"Yes. We do not interfere with a developing planet." Sasuke stared a moment longer at the weaker creatures on the projection-floor hologram, noting their similar faces and smaller statures. "We will use the previous solar system and hope that a 43% chance is good enough."

"Now, aren't you glad I forced you out of your seclusion, little brother?"


	2. Chapter 2: The God Complex

I do not own Naruto.

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Chapter 2:  
The God Complex

"Sasuke, would you come and look at this?" Itachi crowed from the other side of the command center. Sasuke had ordered the information about the habitated world to be filtered, only allowing certain facts into consideration about the people living there. This was merely for the purpose of keeping the crew's interest un-peaked, but it only served to do the opposite. Any chance his older brother got, he was observing them. And that meant he was observing them often, which also meant that he was endlessly talking about them. Granted, the only information he was allowed to see were things such as their languages, governments, and so on. But Sasuke was growing increasingly irritated with his brother's continual perusal of the under-evolved species, finding any excuse to examine the monitors of info.

The one thing that Sasuke had made sure was, without a doubt, that Itachi and the other crew members would not see the people themselves. Joining in study of their basic religious practices and strange ceremonies that they called "weddings" was jovial enough. But Sasuke knew that becoming too personal with such a species could be dangerous, especially with someone as intrigued as Itachi or as impulsive as Naruto. It would be a very dangerous combination if the two knew anything about the physicality of the creatures, other than the fact that they eerily resembled his own race. It still put a twist in his gut, even after it had been many years since they stumbled upon the planet (after finding it, Sasuke himself had returned to his home to confront the council about their plans of cultivating a new world. What was supposed to be a short meeting ended up with him staying to rule the empire while Itachi remained in the new galaxy and changed the new planet's atmosphere, which was a job that would take more than a century without damaging the planet itself. Sasuke had only returned to the ship two weeks prior and Itachi had deemed it his mission to inform Sasuke of absolutely everything they were able to learn, which was not much.)

True, they seemed to evolve at a rapid speed. But that wasn't enough for the younger Uchiha to take chances of making contact with the small planet they called "Earth." Such a strange name. Such strange languages and beliefs. He would have refused to know any of these things about the people if Itachi and the Uzumaki didn't prattle about it incessantly. "Look at what?" he finally ground out, frowning at the crewdecker he was trying to speak with. Itachi, of course, was interrupting his endeavors….again. No doubt he was going to remark on yet another _grand invention_ that the "humans" had ventured upon. Sasuke briefly remembered the last inventions that had put Itachi into all kinds of fits of excitement:

_"__They have this thing they call a car, which they sit in and it moves them from place to place- essentially it looks like a box of metallic structures, and it ruins their air supply quite badly, but they don't know that yet."_

_"__They set fire to these "cigarettes" and breathe them in, which gives them a disease that kills them many years later- but they do it anyway."_

_"__They only live approximately a century. Such a short time in the span of all things. Can you imagine only a century of life? It's almost sad."_

_"__Mars- that's what they call the other planet. They sent this "rover" thing onto it and brought back rock samples, just like with their moon. Quite an inquisitive species. I can tell we'll get along just fine—once you finally remove that stick up your ass and make contact with them, of course."_

_"__The cars don't even pollute their air supply anymore, they just fly around in them using power from their sun, which I guess used to be written in fictional books but it took them two centuries to conquer the technology for it to be readily available."_

"They've made nuclear-powered ships to "seek unknown answers to the mysteries of the universe."" He fiddled with the controls a little, bringing up a hologram of the small ship, which seemed like a grain of rice compared to their own.

"They can't even use the energy from another planet yet instead of destroying their own. What makes you think this will even work?" Sasuke gave up trying to actually do his job, because it obviously just wasn't going to happen. At least, not while his brother was still alive.

"I didn't say it was going to work. I just said they made it. It definitely won't work." Itachi mused, enhancing the holographic projection and examining the detailed spacecraft they had constructed. "That thing won't make it past Saturn."

"Why are you so interested in knowing their inventions if you'll never meet one of them?" the younger Uchiha trudged to the module and flipped the projection off, earning a scowl form Itachi.

"And whose fault is that?"

"Mine." Sasuke agreed abruptly. "But you're forgetting that you were the first to agree that not interfering was the best solution."

"Yes, it was the best solution. But that was three hundred years ago-"

"Itachi," he started, planning to deny him completely. But looking at his older brother's face and remembering the pain it had held when Sasuke had been crowned heir, instead of Itachi who had its birthright, he felt enough pity for his only living family member that his resolve suddenly softened. "If you wish, once we finish with this new planet, we will make contact—if, and only if, they are worthy by that time." Sasuke knew he was giving Itachi too much hope, because he was sure they would not advance to that degree in merely another century. But the words were out and he could not retract them now that Itachi held that soft, almost loving, smile. Itachi loved those ignorant, strange people; and Sasuke was sure that he would never understand why since he personally hated them so much.

"Of course. It would certainly brighten the boredom around here."

"Only on one condition, Itachi." Said man listened intently for the younger one's compromise. "We will only make contact in the future if you cease this obsession you have. We are landing soon and this craft will return home without us. It is our job now to focus solely on this new planet, not the one you so openly adore." He scoffed, trying to sound domineering but the smirk on Itachi's face proved it to be anything else.

"That is easily agreeable. Though, I can't promise that when we do make contact, my obsessions won't resurface."

Sasuke certainly hoped that he was joking.

* * *

"Sakura," Ino twiddled her thumbs, leaning her hip against the doorframe and peering into the file room, searching for the familiar tuft of pink hair she was sure to see. As if on command, a feminine grunt sounded from behind a massive stack of manila envelopes. "What are you doing in here?" Ino huffed, making noises of protest while trying her best to maneuver through the stacks without creating an earthquake of paperwork to fall onto her friend that was perched on the floor, staring so hard at the words on a page that she was sure she would go cross-eyed. The rosette-haired intern responded only with a glance at Ino then returned to her staring. "Seriously, Tsunade sent you to your quarters an hour ago and is now on a man-hunt. Go to sleep. I'm tired of looking at your ugly face."

"Excuse me, Ino-pig, but you haven't seen my face since this morning. So, shut up. I'm busy." Haruno Sakura then lifted an almighty chin and huffed, going back to her work with a superior expression.

"What are you so busy with anyway, you Cow?" The blond insulted, watching Sakura's feathers ruffle.

"You wouldn't be interested, Pig. You work in the Geology department—the only thing you're useful for here is telling me that my diamond necklace isn't real-"

"Well, it's not. That much is obvious." She insulted back, falling easily into their usual, unprofessional banter.

"Seriously, Ino, what are you doing in the Astronomy wing?" Sakura finally placed the abused file in the teetering stack and regarded her.

"I already told you, Stupid. Tsunade is looking for you." Ino frowned. Did the pink girl ever listen to anyone, or was she too bust geeking-out over stupid constellations?

"That's not unusual, Ino. She is my mentor, after all." Sakura thought she should point out, thinking Ino to be exaggerating a little too much about this.

"Whatever." The blond puffed and turned away, exiting with a flippant wave of her hand in farewell. "It's your funeral. I'll make sure to carve the word "ugly" into your tombstone."

Sakura opened her mouth to retort, but the blond was already gone and the door shut loudly, shaking the folders and causing them to collide with her lap in a heap of chaos. "Ino, you ass!" she hollered, shooting up and marching to the door. Flinging it open, she came face to face with none other than her annoyed mentor, Tsunade.

"There are people trying to sleep, Sakura-" The busty woman started but quickly changed the subject when she noticed the large mess of files behind her favorite apprentice's back from the doorway. "How do you make such large messes?—Whatever-" Tsunade changed courses again, shutting the door snugly behind her and giving the mess another annoyed look before focusing on the young woman in front of her. "We need to talk about something-"

"Is it about my thesis?" Sakura leapt, hoping her conclusion was correct. A nod of Tsunade's head proved that it was. "Is it still in your office?"

"Do you think I'm stupid?" Tsunade barked and Sakura refused to truthfully reply. "No, it's with me." She tapped an index finger on a bundle of papers in the crook of her arm. "I don't want Shizune snooping around my office, figuring out things that are best left between you and I…." she trailed off, for the first time in the conversation looking into Sakura's eyes. "You do understand why it is important to keep this a secret, right, Sakura?"

"Of course I do, Shishou." The rosette tried to hide her disappointment that Tsunade would doubt her integrity at a time like this.

"I had to ask." Tsunade's eyes then hardened and the Haruno knew the subject had changed for the worse. "I need you to show me. That way, we can be absolutely sure. Meet me in the Arena SubPar in ten minutes…." She bit her thumb so hard that Sakura was surprised it didn't split open. "And clean up this mess later, I hate the smell of messy files in the morning."

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The Uchiha brothers, upon their grand stallions at the end of a secluded gravel road that lead out of the city they had recently manufactured, regarded each other. It had been a short ride with only light banter but now, Itachi decided, there was business to speak of. "So…" he began and scratched the back of his neck, not really knowing how to phrase what he wanted to ask.

"So, what?" Sasuke was immediate to reciprocate in that even, dark tone.

"We need to talk about some things."

"So you didn't bring me out here to look at the scenery?" Sasuke questioned evenly with a raised brow, gesturing to the forest that began a mere fifty feet from their position where the road broke off into two different paths- toward the nothingness of the rest of the planet, and into the dark forest they had planted upon their arrival. They had built and cultivated the last seventy-five years, but that wasn't much time in the grand scheme of things. Only a few cities now stood in the distance behind them, through the fog of the horizon. "How disappointing."

"Let's be serious, little brother." Itachi chided. "I've been informed that you have requested the council to send civilian families here. Are you sure it is not too abrupt a decision? After all, we're not even sure this planet will change anything with our wo-"

Sasuke's mind, at first, had some trouble registering the loaded, although simple, question. "Do you believe me to make brash decisions, Itachi?" He cut in and didn't wait for an answer- and didn't turn to see Itachi's shaking head. "This planet will be our last chance for a change. Let us hope this works, or we will cease to exist." He turned his dark eyes to the distance, gazing upon the city that would be their new home and— for only a moment—Itachi could believe that he saw a sliver of vulnerability in his brother's expression. "The families will come, my decision is final. They will live here, they will thrive, and we will expand. And, in time, things will be better for our people."

"Don't drown in that hope, Sasuke. It might blind you."

"Don't get philosophical with me," Sasuke couldn't must up the ability to sound harsh, his smirk giving him away. "If we don't hope, no one will. We need to set an example to the others."

"So, you've finally become the leader Father always wanted?"

Maybe it was because responsibility portrayed a great part of his life and education: it had been taught to him since infancy and—his family, his clan, his planet, his brother…everything was counting on this- on his decisions, as the future King. Needless to say, because of these things- his role as 'savior of his people' had barely added to the weight. "I just needed a reason, Itachi." He tore himself from the distant buildings and searched his older brother's gaze to find understanding and his own beliefs warring together. "You may think me cruel, but I will do anything for the good of my people. Anything." He turned his steed in the opposing direction, facing the city he had been staring at since leaving it. "Let's head back. There's more work to be done and the families will be arriving shortly." He could already see the shuttle carrying men and women from his home planet, it hurtled toward the center of the city and burned through the atmosphere.

* * *

Sakura's heels clicked on the polished floor of the Arena SubPar when she entered, greeted by a solemn-looking Tsunade and a tall, built young man with long brown hair tied at the base of his neck. They were standing on the terrace over-looking the arena floor, next to the observational tower's entrance. "I thought this was supposed to be classified information?" Sakura blanched, nodding indiscreetly to the man standing at Tsunade's right when she approached them by the tower's entrance. The observational tower monitored the Gilb Telescope and the Hoit Probe's own information as it explored the deep space of the galaxy.

"Neji will not betray me. Your father engineered him for this facility and I've brought him along to observe."

To this, Neji offered his hand to Sakura but it hung awkwardly between them. "I've never met one of you before." She admitted, looking at his hand as if it would detach at any moment.

"One of what?" He tilted his head and the semi-emotionless, perfect pronunciation would have been enough for her to see that he was not human. He still held his hand rigidly in front of himself—as straight as the rest of his posture.

"A robot-"

"Pardon me, but I do not like to be categorized in those terms." He removed his hand and clenched it at his side. He gave her a glare that she could tell was meant to scorch her. But she could think of nothing to say to that, other than muttering a grudging apology and bowing slightly in his direction before following Tsunade's into the observational room. She could feel Neji throwing exclamation marks at her back behind her as he joined and locked the door.

"I want you to show us _exactly_ what it was that you observed." Tsunade began, ignoring the tense atmosphere between the rosette and the cyborg. "Your thesis mentioned an earth-like planet 200 light-years away. I had Neji scan with the Gilb and there were no traces in that area." The blond altered the Gilb telescope's path, gazing upon the screen as it peered deep into their own galaxy. A star, smaller than their own, orbited by three dense, rocky planets appeared on the screen.

"Perhaps she was wrong?" Neji speculated.

"I'm not wrong." Sakura would have stomped her foot if she thought it would help her argument. Instead she resorted to fumbling with the monitor herself, directing it closer to the sun's horizon. "When I first noticed something different, it was while monitoring the pictures from the Hoit Probe as it ascended into the solar system." Her small fingers found the dialpad of the Probes monitor, to the left of the Gilb's. "The pictures were fuzzy and at first I thought it was simply a solar flare," a picture from the Hoit Probe came onto the monitor. Near the sun's horizon there was an object peeping from behind it, much smaller in stature "But when viewing in infer-red, the heat signature was significantly less. If it were a solar flare, this would not be the case." She switched the monitor to infer-red as she spoke, showing her findings. The large red sun at the right of the screen and the much smaller sphere just beginning to come around its side- the small sphere only grey and almost indiscernible in the blackness of the background. "It was smaller when I first viewed it, though it still hasn't moved much which only indicates that it orbits slower around its own sun than Earth does—and from its size and distance from this sun, it is in perfect conditions to house life but…"

"But what?" Tsunade leaned in, peering closely at the pixilated image, comparing the two to each other and nodding at her own private thoughts. Neji leaned casually against a chair that nobody seemed interested in using, glancing now and again over Tsunade's shoulder and trying to seem disinterested.

"But when the probe neared the planet, an unexpected interference cut the transmission and we could not receive pictured data any longer. But it monitored a drastic change of atmosphere within only a week's time— I couldn't receive enough information to guess exactly how long it has been changing but the velocity of its alterations is so startling that there must be something there that is causing it. Planets don't act strangely on their own—they change over millions of years, not within a century."

"What are you suggesting?" Neji raised a brow, shifting onto his left leg in a move that was so strangely human it put a scratchy vibe in her stomach.

Instead of answering, she turned to Tsunade. Taking a deep breath and preparing herself for rejection, she went for it: "I want to join the shuttle mission H-273. I know that after the interference with Hoit Probe's transmissions they are sending the shuttle to resurrect it. If we add a few scientists and volunteers we can resurrect the probe and also view the planet first-hand-"

"Sakura," Tsunade sighed, leaning back and grasping the chair in front of her for leverage. "I don't think you understand what you're saying. A shuttle mission to this solar-system would span twenty years. The mission specialists of H-273 are trained to survive hyper-sleep and the rigors of deep-space….By the time the shuttle returns, many people you know will be dead. You won't age in hyper-sleep, and the people you love will age here while you are gone. What you are asking is more than you can imagine-" Tsunade stopped herself when she looked at the determined face of her last apprentice and sighed again, wishing she could look anywhere else than into those fierce eyes that reminded Tsunade of herself, so many years ago. "You're not going to let this go, are you?"

"No." Sakura answered plainly. "I became your apprentice because we had the same dream of finding other worlds. Now that I have that opportunity, I am going to take it. I don't know what we will find, but I can't not go. Especially since I was the one to find what could be the most significant discovery in the history of science."

"You found it by accident, Girly." Neji drawled from the chair he had plopped into during her rant. "Stop getting to emotional- It frizzes my circuits. Also, the shuttle launches in 90 days and you have absolutely zero training in that field."

Tsunade bit her lip in a fashion that was familiar to Sakura. She did it whenever she was about to give in. "Ignore Neji. He has was programmed to be logical-"

"Which is just another word for pessimistic." Sakura mumbled.

Tsunade gave the younger woman her full attention and a wry smile. "You have three months to pass the training. After that, I can't stop you, Sakura."

* * *

Well, there it is. Hopefully the preamble wasn't too boring. I had to get everyone caught up and informed in these first two chapters. In the next chapter, Sakura and Sasuke will meet, finally.

Thank you all for reading and, as always, please review so I can know if people actually like this story or if I'm all alone in this universe :))


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